Person Re-Identification in a Car Seat: Comparison of Cosine Similarity and Triplet Loss based approaches on Capacitive Proximity Sensing data

Currently there is much research in the area of person identification. Mostly it is based on multi-biometric data. In this paper, we aim to leverage soft biometric properties to achieve person re-identification by using unobtrusive sensors, envisioning assistive environments, which recognize their user and thus automatically personalize and adapt. In practice, a car seat recognizes the person who sits down and greets the person with their own name, enabling various customisation in the car unique to the user, like seat configurations. We present a system composed of a sensor equipped car seat, which is able to recognize a person from a predefined group. We contribute two classification approaches based on cosine similarity measure and on triplet loss learning. These are thoroughly analysed and evaluated in a user study with nine participants. We achieve the best re-identification performance using a hand-crafted feature approach based on the comparing measure of cosine similarity combined with majority voting. The highest overall precision achieved in re-identifying a person from a group of nine users is 80 %.